I really like watching movies. Not TV shows so much, but if I had a job that required me to watch movies all day, that would be alright. Old movies are especially fun to watch, for some reason. It's interesting to see how early movies have clearly influenced contemporary flicks and often been remade and presented as something new.
There are a number of elements in older films that make them interesting to watch. One, they had no CGI or sophisticated special effects of any kind. Any fancy stuff had to be done by hand and since they were inventing techniques as they went along, it required a lot of creativity and invention. Making the transition from stage acting to film acting (two very different things) took some time, too. Stage acting required exaggerated movements, expressions, and dialogue since much of the audience often sat some distance from the stage and did not have the benefit of being up close to the action. This is why much of the acting in early films was so melodramatic and overstated.
Another thing that makes old movies so fun to watch is that society and culture has changed so much over the past one hundred years that much of the common parlance back then has been lost and comes across odd or just plain funny when we hear them now. This is true when it comes to styles of dress, mannerisms, and the contrast between the things that are entertaining now and the things that entertained people back then.
I'm a fan of the film noir genre from the 40s and 50s, but I also like to watch some of the early silent films. Some of them actually hold up to today's standards – as far as dialogue and plot go – but others are just bizarre. For example, I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari earlier this week. This movie is full of creativity and weirdness, but the weirdness is what really makes it shine. It was filmed in Germany in 1920 and had a very surreal, expressionist set with crooked doorways, oddly-shaped windows, leaning walls, and strange props. If Tim Burton traveled back in time, this would've been his movie.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is all sorts of disturbing and most of the time I really had no idea what was going on. That just added to its creepy, sinister vibe. The dialogue frames in the movie were few and far between, so a lot took place between each one, leaving me guessing as to what was going on. One of the characters, Cesare, was especially chilling and I think his appearance has inspired the makeup for a lot of metal bands. He sort of reminded me of Edward Scissorhands, too, for some reason. It moved along, though, and didn't drag on into tedium (which old-timey movies sometimes do).
Anyway, here are some stills from the movie. Those old-timers knew how to keep it creepy!
